“How can I help your unbelief?” came a voice.
I had been staring at Mr. Stoker. His lips had not moved. I looked, then, at the wolf by his side.
It spoke again: “Your unbelief, Mr. Fort. How can I help it?”
The wolf moved forward, hunkered down as if to pounce, and at once became an army of rats that swarmed across the stage and into the orchestra pit and emerged in the aisle as the proprietor who had led me down here. “Does this help?” he asked of me.
I rose to my feet and began to frantically make my way over the seats toward what I believed to be the staircase I had descended earlier. My heart was pounding against my chest with such force I feared it would smash through my ribs and tissue.
The proprietor became several bats who quickly swooped down and around me, assaulting me with their wings. I fell to the floor and the bats collided in a flash of darkest shadow and became the proprietor again, only now he was much younger in appearance, taller, stronger.
Eternal.
“Look upon me and fear, Mr. Fort. For I am as real as you dread I am.”
He reached down and grabbed onto my jacket with one hand, lifting me off the floor with unnerving ease so that my feet dangled above the aisle like some marionette left hanging on a peg.
I could not take my eyes from his blood-red gaze.
“My biographer, my creator, wishes for his cast to be given their proper curtain call, the one denied them so many years ago.” He slammed me down into the nearest seat and held me there with one mighty hand on my shoulder.
“Nothing less than your most enthusiastic applause will ensure your safe exit from this place,” snarled Count Dracula in my ear.
An iron grate in the floor near the foot of the stage shifted with a nerve-wracking shriek and was cast aside by a hand that was more bone than flesh.
And the parade of the dead began.
How to describe what I saw? How to convey the pathetic, terrifying, sad, depraved sight which my eyes beheld?
Their flesh—what remained of it—had the color and texture of spoiled meat. Worms and other such creatures of filth oozed in and out of the holes in their faces where once their eyes had resided. The stench of death was sickly sweet in the air. Some shambled, a few crawled, and one—a woman—had to be carried by another cast member because much of her lower torso was gone, leaving only dangling, tattered loops of decayed intestine which hung beneath her like a jellyfish’s stingers.
I wept at the sight of them, but I applauded them; oh, how I applauded!
And I was not alone in my efforts.
Surrounding me, each of them as decayed and pathetic as the sad creatures who were assembling on the stage before us, were all the characters from Stoker’s novel, all of them flesh and blood, all of them—thanks to the Count’s actions—now equally un-dead: here was Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker; there was Dr. Seward and Lucy, Lord Godalming and Quincey, and every last character from the novel who had participated in Dracula’s destruction, only now they were the destroyed ones… even the great Abraham Van Helsing. All un-dead and applauding those whose portrayals and belief had brought them into this world and given them life—albeit briefly.
I became aware of several women clothed in white encircling me as I continued to applaud and the cast to take their individual bows.
The brides of Dracula surrounded me, caressed me, touched me with their lips and hands. My temperature rose in depraved want for them, and I applauded all the harder for it.
“My cast,” intoned Stoker from the stage, gesturing to each member of his troupe. “My fine cast, my dear friends.”
Dracula wiped something from one of his eyes. Looking at me, he smiled his awful, bloody grin and said, “I am moved, are you not the same?”
“I am,” I said, quite dizzy.
The applause from the audience grew deafening. Dracula parted his arms and became a giant man-bat thing with slick flesh. He flew above stage and proceeded to land gracefully in the center of the players.
“Let my brides pleasure you, Mr. Fort,” he bellowed above the noise in a voice part human and part beast, “and worry not, for they will not feed on you. You are our messenger now. Leave here, and tell the world, if you have the courage, that I am real, and that as long as men read my story, I shall never die. With the coming years and centuries, my story will be read by thousands, millions more, and each time the book is opened, each time a page is turned, I grow stronger and more eternal! Tell this to the world, sir, if you dare! For in the centuries to come my followers will grow, they will read of me, go forth, and multiply, and there will come a night when the entire earth will awaken and pull in the sweet damned breath of the un-dead, and then I will be as I should have been from the very beginning: The true Prince of Night, the king of my kind! Go, then, and tell them, if you dare.”
One of his brides fell on her knees before me whilst another began to tear at my shirt.
The applause swelled as Dracula himself took a bow, and then I fell down into a dizzying pit of desire and darkness.
When I regained consciousness, I found myself outside the Lyceum Theatre, some good distance from where I was staying.
I cannot say for certain how I came to arrive safely back at my rooms at Bedford Place, only that I did find my way back there and was at once taken by the arm and led to an office where I was given a stiff drink of whiskey while a constable was called to take my statement.
“Robbery and Assault” was the official explanation for my condition. I saw no reason to argue their conclusion.
The next day, no fewer than three bodies were discovered around London, the blood drained from their veins.
The next day, I discovered reports of several other deaths in Canada, the United States, and Germany.
I returned home soon after, and for the rest of my life continued to gather such stories of bloodless bodies.
I am now an old man and my time is short. It has taken me a lifetime to muster the courage to set this tale to paper. Whether or not you choose to believe this is a matter between you and your conscience. I can no longer say I neither believe nor disbelieve anything. Belief or unbelief, the dark forces of the Universe will have their way, regardless.
At my window last night I beheld the countenance of Mr. Bram Stoker, himself among the un-dead now; beside him was his creation, the Count, and in his eyes was a promise:
I fear I may not be alive come morning.
Not that I would have lived that much longer, anyway.
So I take my leave of you. Do with this narrative what you will. The night is nearly upon us.
An article in yesterday’s
So many readers. So many pages turned.
And he grows stronger with each word read.
I fear it may be sooner than we think.
I shall lay down my head for the last time now.
God go with you in all the damned places that you walk.
Soon, such places shall be all there are.
